


forever doesn't exist (but we have a word for it anyways)

by typervoxilations



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Ending, Fix-It, Indoctrination Theory, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 16:16:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12257808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typervoxilations/pseuds/typervoxilations
Summary: As long as one person was left standing in the end.This was her sacrifice of ten thousand to save twenty thousand.(Victory at all costs.)





	forever doesn't exist (but we have a word for it anyways)

**Author's Note:**

> Playing around with the Indoctrination Theory idea. Even if you don’t believe it, c’mon, it’s interesting to think about at least? Not enough IT fics here. There are some pretty compelling arguments and saying the entire ending of ME3 was lazy writing feels like the equivalent of _Ah, yes, “Indoctrination Theory.” The idea that everything in the Mass Effect 3 ending was all in Shepard’s head. We have dismissed this claim._  
>  I’m onto you guys.  
>  _I’m onto you._
> 
> So.  
> Here we go.  
> Unbeta'd as usual.
> 
> Earthborn, sole survivor, paragon-destroy.

"No one knows

what infinity

looks like."

 

_ Tell me one thing that amazes you _ . -  **n.t.**

* * *

  
It starts off like a dream.

 

Like  _ her  _ dreams.

 

There are shadowy whispers in the corners of her eyes but she blinks and they slither away between bare trees and overturned shuttles. Her ears are ringing from the blast. Someone might be screaming. All she can see are the dead bodies scattered ahead of her. She’s in so much pain she can only hobble forward, slowly, achingly slow. Everything  _ throbs  _ with white hot agony. But the light. The Citadel beam is so close she can almost taste the discharge in the air. 

 

Stop the Reapers.

 

Get to the beam.

 

_ Stop the Reapers. _

 

She doesn’t notice the Marauder until her shoulder jerks back and the pain slams into her a second later. Her response is instinctive.

 

Headshot.

 

Move on.

 

Mindlessly, painstakingly.

 

She’s almost there.

 

And then-

 

===

 

_ ('God... they're all gone.' _

 

_ 'Did we get anyone to the beam?' _

 

_ 'Negative. Our entire force was decimated. It's too much, we need to regroup, fall back to the buildings-') _

 

===

 

Her body slams into the floor and she whimpers, hands and knees, moves to retch but nothing comes out. Heaves. God, the  _ smell _ . Dust and rust, just like Akuze. For a second she thinks she can taste sand clogging her throat, but then her fingers twitch and the grit under her nails isn’t there anymore - the metallic tang on her tongue is just the recycled staleness of Citadel air. She realizes for the first time that she’s lost her helmet. When had that happened? There are more dead bodies here than there were down on Earth. She doesn’t look at their faces for fear she actually will throw up.

 

This isn’t the Citadel she remembers. 

 

She’s never been to anywhere in the Citadel that looks like this. 

 

It looks like.

 

The inside of the Collectors’ ship that had been a trap.

 

The underbelly of the geth frigate where she had found what had looked like Legion.

 

The Illusive Man’s empty, spacious room, overlooking a dying blue-red planet.

 

The images shift, overlap, shimmering in and out of focus like she’s hit her head. Has to be bloodloss because she must be on the Citadel. She has to be. There is a Keeper not three feet away, unperturbed by the carnage around it. Why would a Keeper be anywhere but the Citadel?

 

She’s not completely lucid enough, world blurring black at the edges, but.

 

There is something… wrong.

 

Not- not wrong. Off. Maybe.

 

Anderson doesn’t have a scratch on him. He had to have been right behind her and the Reaper… Her head hurts with the effort to remember. Had he been anywhere near her? He… must have been. And the Illusive Man is… how is he here again? Every time he speaks, there is an ache in her head, throbbing, insistent.  _ Look at me, listen to me _ . It’s hard to concentrate, like the way her ears ring in silence, getting louder. Her gun arm won’t  _ move _ , shaking, trembling with the effort, fighting against every direction she tries to push it. 

 

_ Shoot Anderson. _

 

_ No. _

 

Doesn’t matter, her trigger finger twitches and someone makes a breathy grunt of pain. 

 

_ It must be Anderson, _ she thinks, disconnected in the moment. He’s bleeding. She shot him. Somehow, the Illusive Man had made her shoot the Admiral. She thinks this should worry her - she’s too busy wondering  _ how the fuck _ .  _ Controlling the Reapers is the solution _ , she sees his mouth form the words but the sound is swallowed by the agony - she wants to shake her head. Husk-black skin is making his cheeks wither, electric blue streaking like lightning, pulsing in time with his agitated attempts to convert her - this is what his desire to control led to. 

 

Indoctrination’s not supposed to give you superpowers. 

 

She shoots him.

 

Of course she does.

 

He’d wanted something great for them, but in the end… absolute power corrupts absolutely, and she’s done with this most of all.

 

She slumps down on the ground next to Anderson, aching, stinging. Her gut revolts and she realizes she’s bleeding there too, blood pooling slick and disgusting beneath her thighs. She hadn’t noticed that before, too busy with the one the Marauder blasted into her shoulder probably, the way her skin stung where it was peeled by the Reaper beam. Frowns at the way it feels like she’d been shot. 

 

She hadn’t been shot there. Had she? Pain makes her mind hazy, slow and numb. 

 

“It’s quite a view.”

 

“Best seats in the house.”

 

She’s under no illusions. They’re going to die here. They’re going to-

 

She’s more at peace with the thought than she thought she would be - still a little afraid, but not by that much. She supposes she always has been, maybe, alright with death. She’s tired, she’s so  _ fucking  _ tired, and now - god, now she might finally get a chance to  _ stop _ . 

 

She was always supposed to die. 

 

As a starving orphan on the streets. With her team in the belly of a thresher maw. As a martyr in the void of a ripped apart Normandy SR-1 on a trajectory into the forgotten cold of Alchera. She’s three (twenty? thirty?) years late for it but she was always going to die. 

 

Which afterlife would she end up in? She’d promised to meet Garrus at the bar, but maybe she could also end up on a sandy beach somewhere. Mordin would be fascinated over the seashells. She hoped Thane’s Shore was literal - beachside bar it was then. If she was lucky, Kaidan would be there and she would be able to apologize in person. 

 

“Anderson?”

 

Her voice is small, vulnerable in a way she hasn’t allowed herself to be in a long time. He acknowledges with a quiet sound.

 

_ I don’t know if I’m ready _ , she doesn’t say, wants to reach over and grab his hand, shake him awake.  _ Don’t leave me to go alone _ .  _ DId I do the right thing? _

 

“Stay with me. We’re almost through this.” 

 

A ghost of a smile flickers across his lips, as if he knew what she really wanted to say. “You did good, child. You did good.” Her eyes burn hot but she refuses to cry. “I'm proud of you.” 

 

She’s accepted he’s gone even before she really understands it. His arm is pressed against hers and it’s long stopped moving in time with the expansion and compression of his lungs. She’s too exhausted for even grief. “Thank you, sir,” she chokes out to silence, words she wished she could’ve told him when he could still hear her. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the chance. Thank you for the support. Thank you for believing in me always, always, when no one else did, when there wasn’t anyone else. Thank you for everything.  _ I’m right behind you. _

 

The stars seem to shine brighter behind the veil of unshed tears. 

 

But the universe was cruel, cruel,  _ crueller  _ still.

 

How did Hackett know she was up here?

 

How had Hackett known she was still  _ alive? _

 

Words fused together in her head with desperation and she can’t,  _ she can’t _ , she doesn’t know how to fix this anymore it’s all spiralling out of her control, she can’t do this anymore -

 

Her arm gives out from under her and she could  _ sob _ with helpless exhaustion.

 

The floor moves, shifts, lifts, takes her with it, and she’s so tired she barely staggers to her feet to the apparition that appears in front of her, forces her to make yet another choice.

 

Choices, choices, so many  _ fucking _ choices, the path split literally in front of her, as if it were that easy.

 

Synthesis? 

 

Could she make that choice? 

 

God, no.

 

She’d just become the Illusive Man - the memory of refugees and husks and Miranda’s death on Sanctuary was still too fresh in her mind for that. Miranda, no matter how prickly she had always been in the beginning, had been her friend in the end. No. Not Synthesis. She had no right to that. She would not try to navigate that slippery slope. She was too tired.

 

Control? 

 

It seemed like the logical choice, but she had become wary of children apparitions. Odd how he looked exactly like the child that died on Earth. The one haunting her dreams. It was as if the Catalyst pulled that image straight out of her head. Creeping suspicion coiled indecision into the twist of her lips. 

 

Control was also Cerberus’s goal. Another Illusive Man choice. Something he’d been repeating, in the end, blue lines on his face, indoctrinated. Control Reapers? They were too smart for that. Indoctrinated. Was the control choice something the Reapers wanted?

 

It was obvious the Catalyst wanted her to not choose to destroy them, illustrating disadvantage over disadvantage of the choice. Wouldn’t she? The Catalyst was still a Reaper-made construct. They had tried and succeeded in making the entire known universe believe the Mass Relays were Prothean. Reapers were known to lie. It seemed too good to be true. Her life for the rest of the galaxies’. Just like that? Just like that. There had to be a catch. There was always a catch. She had broken their cycle of harvest by standing there. They would just give up that easily? No. Of course not. She hadn’t survived by trusting anything but her own gut. She hadn’t come this far on blind hope. 

 

And yet.

 

That left the option to destroy.

 

The thorough decision. 

 

No more Reapers, sentient life left to expand, grow,  _ live _ .

 

But no more geth, either - could she do that to them when she had worked so hard for the peace between geth and quarian? She had trusted Legion. Defended them. Given them the choice to be their own people and they had chosen peace. They had been her family too, that odd, witty geth collective who had admired her so much they had patched themselves up with a piece of her armor, and they were finally free. 

 

No more EDI - could she do that to Joker, sacrifice another of her friends for the cause, scar him again after making him the last person to see her alive the last time? Could she do that to EDI, whom had come to her for advice on how to be more human, how to live, how to love, who had the chance for a life outside what Cerberus had intended for her?

 

No more mass relays, no more travelling beyond the reach of their own solar system to far off star clusters at FTL speeds. She would be stranding the entirety of the war fleet in Sol, with light years between here and home.

 

She could feel the Catalyst growing impatient with her. The child was talking, voice echoing and distorted like trying to listen to a hanar, but she could barely focus, like trying to understand the Illusive Man. At times, the voice sounds like her own insecurities.

 

_ You are part synthetic, you’d be killing yourself _ .

 

Either way, she’d die. 

 

Sacrificing her life for the chance to send all the Reapers packing seemed like a noble choice. She wanted to save everyone. Always had. Her therapist would’ve told her that it was a symptom of a complex borne of her loss on Akuze. But her whole life had been devoted to noble choices and this is where she ended up; ignored, distrusted, no longer in her own skin, fitting strangely in a body not even hers. She had lost friends in the war that never had to be this devastating if she had just…  _ spoken up _ . Not been so noble. She didn’t have to agree to save Amanda Kenson and be responsible for the lives of three hundred four thousand nine hundred and forty two batarian lives in the Bahak system. She didn’t have to bring the SR-2 to the Alliance. Maybe she wouldn’t have to have gone on another hunt for her crew, hadn’t had to waste a year grounded when she could have been bolstering the galaxy’s defenses. 

 

How long would they listen to her? Fifty thousand more years until they came back for a later harvest cycle? She had seen their human Reaper. She didn’t want that to happen again. To anyone else. How long would she have them controlled, if they were even going to be controlled at all?

 

She’d never been much of a believer, but she closes her eyes, heart aching. She had promised herself that this was exactly what she was going to avoid. She remembers the conversation with Garrus as clearly as if it were playing out right now.

 

_ Ruthless calculus. _

 

As long as one person was left standing in the end.

 

This was her sacrifice of ten thousand to save twenty thousand.

 

_ Forgive me _ . 

 

Survival was not a sin.

 

Everything fights against her as she drags her feet towards her choice, but as she grows certain of it, the fatigue melts away. By the time she raises her gun again, she’s no longer limping. 

 

Shoot.

 

The strength of the recoil throws her aim off balance, grip faltering, but she regains both as quickly as she is able. If she survives this, if this isn’t all just in her head after all, she hopes the ones she damns today can somehow forgive her. She hopes the ones who are left behind will try to as well.

 

_ Shoot _ .

 

Her head is the clearest it’s been since waking up at the base of the Citadel beam with a haze over her mind that even the pain from being shot hadn’t gotten rid of, dragging herself slowly through thick, near tangible air as if she were walking in slow motion. Maybe it’s adrenaline. Maybe it’s not. But her arm is hers and the pain is not. 

 

Aim.

 

Her friends, her loved ones, the lives sacrificed for this. Her choice. They are hers.

 

_ Destroy _ .

 

The glass shatters, the fire of a point-blank explosion stripping the flesh from her bones, and someone is screaming.

 

_ (Victory at all costs.) _

 

Maybe it’s her.

 

===

 

( _ Pain. _

 

_ Dust and rust. _

 

_ Cracked bone and torn muscle and blood. _

 

_ Concrete beneath her numb fingers, rough and real. _

 

_ The sky is blue and darkening into evening. _

 

_ She can see the stars glimmer behind a curtain of thin clouds. _

 

_ There are no Reaper wails tearing through the air. _

 

_ For the first time in  _ **_years_ ** _ , there is nothing else crowding her head. _

 

_ The tags clink with the movement of her chest.  _

 

_ She heaves a grateful breath. _ )


End file.
